ChronoZoom takes you through 14 billion years of space-time via HTML5

This dynamic atlas of time takes you from the universe's origins to now.

Yesterday, Microsoft Research, Russia's Moscow State University, and UC Berkeley launched ChronoZoom, a dynamic atlas of time. It is not meant to direct travel so much as direct an imaginative exploration of history, writ large.

With the Web-based ChronoZoom, you can move from the "Stelliferous Epoch" to the present day with the flick of a slider. Each major era is pegged down with colored dialogue boxes you can click for multimedia explanations. These include the origins of the Universe and the first stars, the advent of life, agriculture, and the modern world.

When you click one, you can zoom in on that time (hence the name ChronoZoom) and a number of videos appear embedded in the bubble of time you select. For the origin of life, for instance, you can listen to David Christian explain the "Goldilocks conditions" necessary for life and consult a bibliography on the subject. Click on "The Origins of the Modern World" and you are flown through time, passing through graphical structures containing Life, Human Prehistory, and Humanity before coming to rest at the "Threshold" of the modern, 1,000 C.E.

The initial interface is sectioned in two, with the Cosmos occupying four-fifths of the UI and Earth and the Solar System occupying all of the remaining fifth, but for a sliver—and that sliver is us. Some may be daunted to see the data of our insignificance visualized so graphically. Others may be legitimately moved by the amount of time it took to ready the universe for Shakespeare, the DynaTAC, neurosurgery, and flan.

Of course, what if this is just a molecule-thick sheet of time compared to what's to come?

In addition to video and bibliographies, this project provides users with audio and articles on relevant topics.

The project is described as "an open source community project dedicated to visualizing the history of everything to bridge the gap between the humanities and sciences using the story of Big History to easily understand all this information."

It started when Roland Saekow took Walter Alvarez's "Big History" class at Berkeley. The two worked together to make the paper timelines Alvarez used more dynamic, eventually turning to the university's Office of Intellectual Property and Industry Research Alliances for funding to create a much more complete, more dynamic, and shareable timeline. IPIRA connected them with Micosoft and a viable early iteration was born. The team rebuilt the timeline on Windows Azure and HTML5. But to really make the timeline dynamic, they needed math. Lots of it. So they enlisted a development team from Moscow State University, who dovetailed Jscript with the site, creating the fluid motions in the time stream.

"With ChronoZoom," Saekow told Ars, "you can browse history, rather than digging it out piece by piece. Also, today with [fewer and fewer] students visiting the library, the serendipity of browsing for a book and finding another is something we hope ChronoZoom can restore. If you don't know what to search for, it's almost like that topic never existed."

Now comes the time in the project's development where open source comes into its own.

"We envision a world where scientists, researchers, students, and teachers collaborate through ChronoZoom to share information via data, tours, and insight," the ChronoZoom team writes. "Imagine a world where the leading academics publish their findings to the world in a manner that can easily be accessed and compared to other data. We will be focusing on community development of features, capabilities, and content."

The team is asking users to fill out a survey and vote for features they would like to see implemented in future versions of the site.

Among the possibilities for that set are the ability to create a personal timeline or tour, to generate internal bookmarks and to generate a chart and place it into the timeline. Documentation on the project is found on its CodePlex page.

The tech push of JS and HTML is prob more impressive than the actual interface elements themselves. I wouldn't pass out any awards for design - but functionality is rather smooth (they did a decent job of implementing transitions - but this prob more JS than CSS) - and contrary to other opinions is pretty straight forward. Click on something it zooms into that element - click off something and it zooms out - left side - farther in the past - right side - closer to the present - it's not rocket science.

Lanz wrote:

It's not entirely HTML5, there's Flash on that page...

Thanks for pointing out the (flash-based) video clips genius ! Which is completely irrelevant to the rest of the article.

Sounds like Douglas Adams' Total Perspective Vortex, where people were driven mad by being shown the entire Universe and their insignificance relative to it.If you feel the urge to scream while using this, seek professional help. Or stick a fish in your ear (which wouldn't help, but would be appropriate to the subject).

Had a couple of hiccups on Opera Next Alpha for me, but switching into IE9 made it dead smooth. It's a bit bare at the moment, but you can definitely see the potential. I'm very interested to see where this will go and I'll probably try to contribute what I can in the next little while.

For anyone who's remotely interested in this, you should check out Microsoft Research's other project in this vein; Worldwide Telescope. Being able to visualise the realtime as well as past and future positions of every object we've ever mapped in space, from asteroids in the solar system to the extent of the visible universe, is astounding. Astounding in a way this project isn't just yet, but achieve in the future.

I totally agree. I don't understand what the authors of this article are talking about!

Quote:

But to really make the timeline dynamic, they needed math. Lots of it.

Does Curt Hopkins know ANYTHING about mathematics? Has he ever been to school? I'm looking at this website, "ChronoZoom", and it looks like old-school 1990's "interactive multimedia" free-CD-in-a-packet-of-cereal type stuff. The math is totally elementary, as far as it applies to the elements of the user-interface or timeline that I have been able to discover by navigating the site... From what I can see, there's probably less math in ChronoZoom than on this simple page:http://slyman.org/m_projects_mathematic ... ramidAngle

To be fair however: this is the "BETA" version. Suspending final judgement on this until the non-BETA version comes out in 2016...

Had a couple of hiccups on Opera Next Alpha for me, but switching into IE9 made it dead smooth.

Thanks for the tip. I just switched to IE9 on Windows 7 running on a fast SSD on a machine that is not too old, and the site is still rubbish: HTML5 elements jumping around the screen, with long delays between rendering. I've given plenty of time for the elements to load, and have tried prompting various elements to load before retrying; but it's not making any difference.

On IE9, the "timeline" (apparently the main feature of this site) is absolutely unusable: text is coming up at about 5-pixel-size (no matter whether I use my 1920x1080 or my 1280x1024 screen), unless I zoom right in, in which case I cannot see any of the graphics or boxes representing "epochs". This is the worst-designed website I've visited in months.

Not clear where you can zoom out once zoomed in. This is begging to be on a tablet. Might help the interface issues. Glad to see more of this kind of thing, though--in the same vein, Solar Walk on the iPad also does the "you're a speck in the universe" magic very well.

Totally love it! What I'm really waiting for, a vision that I've had since some time (but no technical ability or sufficient ambitions to have a go at it myself), is a site that would visualize the origin and interdependence of scientific/mathematical concepts and inventions through time. I imagine some sort of virtual 3D space where each of these are represented by floating objects (vertical dimension = time), linking "up" to concepts/inventions that depend on it, and linking "down" to concepts/inventions that they themselves depend on. Kinda like how internet sites and links between them are often visualized.

Then you could start for example with an "iPad generation 3", right at the top, and work your way down through each and every concept and invention that ever has been done that proved to be necessary to eventually create the device, through thousands of different pathways. And each node would be clickable and link to the relevant Wikipedia article, for example.

darconias' comment: "Runs pretty poorly on chrome for me. Disappointing and not very impressive at all. Plus very confusing how to navigate." reminded me so much of that Louis C.K. video "Everything is amazing and nobody is happy" that I had to laugh. "How quickly the world owes you something you knew existed 10 seconds ago." http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8m5d0 ... body-i_fun

Curt Hopkins / Curt writes for Ars Technica about the intersection of culture and technology, including the democratization of information, spaceships, robots, the theatre, archaeology, achives and free speech.